Are Autonomous Death-Wielding Robot Soldiers Almost Ready For Battle?

DARPA, the US Pentagon's "mad science arm", just wrapped up trials of 16 robots capable of human-like behaviour. Just how far off is a world run by robot-cops gone mad?!

Climbing ladders is one thing, but the sight of a robot opening and – gasp! – going through a doorway is alarming to say the least. And the speed that he's able to move pieces of lumber? Astounding!

"The DARPA Robotics Challenge trials, or DRC, ended yesterday. The 16 teams and their bots pushed, stumbled, drove, strutted and clambered their way through 8 disaster recovery-related challenges put to them by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's mad science arm, over the course of the last two days.

One person who might be just as happy not to have the Pentagon in charge of the most capable general purpose humanoid robots in the world is Mark Gubrud of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.
 

Let's just say this little guy didn't get picked for the death squad

Gubrud buttonholed me between events to put the fear of God into me about the possible future of these machines. "Clearly there's interest in robot soldiers. That's clearly the long-term goal here, as well as robots to do other dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs," Gruber explained to Gizmodo. His group seeks an international ban on death-dealing autonomous robots. "I think there's an intuitive sense of horror at it, that it's an offense to human dignity for a human being to be killed on the decision of a machine—it is a human responsibility to maintain control of the use of force.""

Scary stuff! 

This is the winning bot from Skynet … err … SCHAFT:
 

And can anyone honestly act surprised to find out the team that won the whole shebang just got acquired by Google recently? Duh, duh, duh. The plot thickens. Now that I think of it, Google does seem as good a candidate as any for the future "Skynet". I mean, they already know what kind of porn everyone on earth likes, how can that kind of information not be used for evil?